though so near the sea, and hence under so salt an aimosphere, often wet the forage for cattle and sheep with water salted, to make it more attractive and nutritious.

3. The salts of lime, the phosphate and the carbonate of lime especially, form more than the half-that is, five hundred and fifty parts in one thousand-of the bony skeletons of animals. When a bone is burned it turns white, though it keeps its shape and some of its solidity. Nothing remains but the salts. On the contrary, if you put a bone in an acid which dissolves the salts, it becomes soft and flexible; and from this you may see the necessity of our using foods which contain the phosphates and carbonates of lime. Wheat and the muscular parts of butchers' meat contain these salts, and so do water and some vegetables.

4. The salts of soda, of potassium, of magnesia, and of iron, which are necessary in different degrees for the formation of parts of our bodies, are contained in small quantities in plants and in solution in water, and are by this means absorbed into the system, and taken indirectly into the blood.

II.—OUR VEGETABLE FOODS.

THE vegetable kingdom furnishes man with substances composed simply of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, such as starch, sugar, and gum, which form a class called CARBO-HYDRATE foods. It also furnishes many kinds of oil, which belong to the class of FATS, and, still further, it supplies us with substances which, being composed of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, belong to FLESH-FORMING foods. It is also largely the vehicle by which mineral food is supplied to us; so that all the four classes of food are found in it. Sometimes, indeed, the same vegetable food contains the whole four, and you may say that there is hardly such a thing as any kind containing only one.

At present I shall speak only about starch and sugar.

Starch.-1. Starch is contained in most plants, but especially in the grain-plants and in the root-plants. Eighty-five in the hundred parts of rice are starch, and seventy-two in the hundred of wheat, while maize, haricot beans, potatoes, and all the kinds of food which are called farinaceous, such as sago, tapioca, &c., and even mushrooms, owe most of their nourishing qualities to it.

2. Starch is made up of minute grains, varying from the onethousandth to the five-thousandth of an inch in size; and these

grains differ in shape in the starch derived from different plants..

They are commonly found in the vegetable cells,* so that to get the starch pure it is necessary to scrape or crush the part containing it, as is done when it is made from potatoes. By washing this bruised matter the starch is easily separated, and falls to the bottom of the water, while the wall of the cells floats, and can be removed. The starch is then itself washed, and is ready for use.

3. The different shapes of starch grains are of great use in aiding the detection of adulteration, and also in discovering from what kind of plant a particular starch has been derived, for it is got from a great many.

Food containing starch ought always to be cooked so as to open the grains before being used as food. Cold water has no effect on them; but when baked or boiled, the different layers of each grain burst and separate, and the mass swells and turns gelatinous, as you see, for example, in the starch used by washerwomen.

Starch readily changes into sugar, or "glucose," as it is called, in boiling water, if an acid be added such as yeast supplies. This curious substance is a microscopic mushroom, the spores, or seeds, of which grow with amazing rapidity. A principle in it called diastase,§ changes the starch into starch sugar, by a process similar to that which we see in sprouting seeds and in the ripening of some sweet fruits.

4. In the same way, from the starch they contain, vegetables and bread, when eaten, are changed into sugar, and this sugar dissolved in water is absorbed by the vessels of the intestines.

Sugars.-1. From what I have already said you will understand at once the great value of sugar, from any source, as nourishment, and of the fruits and vegetables which contain it. It digests very easily, and yields a substance, lactic acid, which aids the digestion of food generally. Far from spoiling the teeth, sugar supplies lime to them by dissolving the phosphate of lime of our food in the lactic acid it produces.

2. It is, therefore, very unwise to keep children from getting sugar; and as to sick people, it is both wine and bread for them. It should, indeed, be within the reach of every mouth. It must not be thought, however, that an unlimited quantity is good for

* vegetable cells are described in the lessons on plants.

t glucose-from Gr. glykys, sweet.

spores-from Gr. sporos, a seed.

§ diastase-from Gr. dia, apart, and histanai, to stand.

old or young. Too much of it is very apt to cause indigestion and biliousness, and, as I have already said, to make the body unduly fat. Nor is this only when it is eaten by itself: to eat too large a proportion of those kinds of food which contain it, or produce it in the system, such as starch, &c., is of course the same thing.

3. The most common sugars are those of the sugar-cane and of the beet-root, the former being almost wholly the kind used in Britain; while the latter is common in France and Russia, and indeed on the continent generally. Many fruits contain a large quantity of sugar: figs, for example, have 62 parts of it in 100 of the fruit; peaches, 16 in 100; pears, 11 in 100. Wheat contains 5 parts of sugar in 100 of the grain, and milk from 4 to 5 in 100 parts.

PART II.

OUR VEGETABLE FOODS-continued.

1. THE CEREALS OR GRAIN PLANTS, which have been cultivated from the remotest antiquity, and have in all ages formed the greater part of the nourishment of most nations, form, with butchers' meat and milk, the best food for man, and they owe this to their special composition.

The whole class, from rice and maize, and oats and barley, to rye and wheat, contain the nutritious principles necessary to support and nourish the system.

2. The organic matter which contains nitrogen consists of a substance known as gluten, which forms their most nutritive part, so that the proportion of gluten in bread fixes its nourishing qualities and its real value. The matter which has no nitrogen in it, is starch, of which I have already spoken, which they all contain in very large quantities. The mineral substances in them are magnesia and lime, soda and potassium, iron, sulphur and phosphorus, with more or less of all the other inorganic substances which form part of the human body.

3. Gluten and starch are the principal substances in the cereals, but their proportions vary, the excess of the one in any grain being marked by a corresponding absence of the other. Thus wheat and rye, which contain, respectively, 11 and 8 parts of gluten in 100, are the poorest in starch, while in rice and maize we find a very large quantity of starch and very little gluten,

Q

There is considerably more gluten and fat in the outside cells of cereal grains than in the inner cells, and hence brown bread is more nourishing than white; but brown bread contains a large quantity of bran, which makes it hard to digest, and causes local irritation of the system to delicate persons.

4. Bread is made of all kinds of grain-of rice in India and China, of maize in the Tyrol, the Pyrenees, and America, and of buckwheat in America and Brittany; but wheat and rye are most commonly used, and are best.

Bread, as you have seen, includes in itself both starch, sugar, &c., and flesh-forming substances; but it does not contain enough of fat and nitrogen to be sufficient to serve as our only food. It is necessary to add to it milk in its various preparations, cheese, butter, vegetables, and a considerable quantity of butchers' meat. Our poor peasants, and, indeed, the poor of cities as well, who enjoy very few of these additions, their food being mainly bread, with a rare slice of bacon or morsel of melted lard, need to eat a much larger bulk to satisfy their hunger than those require who can afford butchers' meat, and they can stand far less hard work.

In every 100 oz. of bread consumed by us there are about 8 oz. of matter calculated to repair the waste in the body, 47 oz. of fuel to keep up the heat, 11⁄2 oz. of mineral matter for the bones and for carrying on other processes; while 203 oz. of charcoal (carbon) are burned completely as fuel to heat the body, and about 4 oz. go in another direction.

66

5. Ordinary bread, as we know, is made with yeast, which forms acids, by means of which the starch in the flour is changed into sugar. This, in its turn, is changed into alcohol, and into carbonic acid gas, which rises through the dough in bubbles, and thus makes the holes in it which constitute light bread. Part of the dough when leavened is kept to leaven other loaves at a future time, and the rest, now ready for the oven, is put into it to bake. The heat stops the fermentation, and drives off the alcohol and most of the carbonic acid gas. It also fixes the loaf in the shape in which it is to be, crusting over the outside, which has to bear a heat of about 400°, while the inside, which has not to stand more than half as much heat, continues light and easy to digest.

6. Stale bread is very little drier than fresh, though very different in appearance, and hence it may be made fresh again, by simply putting it into the oven. Stale bread, however, is more

digestible with most persons than new, from its having less carbonic acid in it.

Bread contains, on an average, one-half as much albuminous matter as butchers' meat, so that any one who tries to live on bread alone will soon find the bad effects of insufficient nourishment.

7. Bread, moreover, is less digestible than butchers' meat, yields little "fibrine," which is the reason why our peasants have looser and weaker muscles than town workmen, who eat more flesh. The starch, which is so abundant in bread, is quickly changed into fat by digestion, and the quantity thus supplied where the diet consists largely of bread is more than the healthy condition of the blood requires. Starch being, moreover, of all kinds of food, that which requires most changes in the body, those who use too much of it are frequently troubled with indigestion, and gradually load the organs and tissues of the body with an excess of fat. Bread is very frequently adulterated with alum to make it take up more water, but the alum is easily detected by dipping a slice of bread into water in which a few chips of logwood have been put, and which has stood for three or four hours by the fire. The alum will change the water into a red or purple colour.

PART III.

OUR VEGETABLE FOODS-continued.

1. Semolina is a preparation of the heart of the wheat grain, and, being rich in gluten, is a digestible and nourishing article of food. It is useful for adding to soups, &c., and makes light and nutritious puddings. Macaroni and vermicelli are also preparations of wheat, and, like semolina, are very nutritious.

2. Oatmeal, which Johnson describes as, in Scotland, the food of the people, but, in England, given to horses, is one of the most nourishing of all articles of food. It contains more flesh-forming and more heat-giving power than even wheat, and more of the mineral salts. Indian corn, or maize, properly prepared, furnishes a wholesome, nutritious, and palatable food, with about the same amount of flesh-formers in it as wheat, but upwards of four times as much fatty matter. The preparations sold under the names of oswego, maizena, and corn flour, are Indian corn deprived of its peculiar flavour by treating the meal with a weak solution of